Eyre Lines

In the first post in this series, I talked about how classical philosophical ideas didn’t cope well with modern science, and suggested that the same might hold with theology. In the second, I talked a bit about Process Theology and why I’d avoided it to date. I’m now going to look at some concepts in classical theology and see how they might be problematic.

Classical theology stresses the transcendence of God; God is wholly other. This is linked with the concept of God as being “holy”, but is not equivalent to it.

It also stresses the perfections of God; in the classical mould, God is all-powerful (omnipotent), all-knowing (omniscient), not bound by time (eternal), creator of all things, perfectly just but also perfectly merciful and loving (omnibenevolent). It isn’t difficult to find proof texts for each of these statements about God in the Bible.

However, it is also not difficult to find texts which don’t read as if God possesses any one of these characteristics.

Thomas Aquinas (perhaps the most influential Christian theologian after St. Paul) also derived some further statements about God. He is the unmoved mover, the origin of motion; the uncaused first cause of all things; the fount and origin of all order. (These are three of the quinque viae, Aquinas’ “proofs of God”; the others are perfection and necessary existence).

Quoting the Wikipedia article, Aquinas determined there were five basic things which could be said of God:

1. God is simple, without composition of parts, such as body and soul, or matter and form.
2. God is perfect, lacking nothing. That is, God is distinguished from other beings on account of God’s complete actuality.Thomas defined God as the ‘Ipse Actus Essendi subsistens,’ subsisting act of being.
3. God is infinite. That is, God is not finite in the ways that created beings are physically, intellectually, and emotionally limited. This infinity is to be distinguished from infinity of size and infinity of number^.
4. God is immutable, incapable of change on the levels of God’s essence and character.
5. God is one, without diversification within God’s self. The unity of God is such that God’s essence is the same as God’s existence. In Thomas’s words, “in itself the proposition ‘God exists’ is necessarily true, for in it subject and predicate are the same.”

The first problem this raises for me is that it takes insufficient account of the immanence of God, his presence in all things (omnipresence). There are also plenty of proof texts for God’s omnipresence, such as Psalm 139:7-12. Yes, classical theology will stipulate the omnipresence of God, but in practice we will see time and again the suggestion that God is “other”, that there is a great gulf fixed between us and God, that being sinful we cannot be in the presence of or accepted by the holy and perfect God. This is probably the most vital problem for me, given that my experience is overwhelmingly of an immanent God, a God present in all things.

Classical theism will also say, however, that God is spirit, and that spirit can indeed permeate everything, but is something distinct from the material. Except insofar as we are acknowledged to be in part spirit ourselves, this also emphasises the “otherness” of God; we are material, God is spiritual and never the twain shall meet, with the exception of the incarnation and, possibly, the Holy Spirit. However, the presence of the Holy Spirit is something which is not always there; the presence of God is in effect rationed. There is, of course, also the sacrament of communion in which God is commonly thought to be particularly present – and passed out in very small bits by a gatekeeper, thus even more rationed. However, spirit-body dualism is a problem area in its own right, which I mention later.

This theology does not, frankly, lend itself well to the evangelical thinking of “relationship with Jesus” either; a tension is created with the distant, unapproachable God.

Process thinking does not draw rigid boundaries, and sees God as intimately involved with the world on every level and needing the participation of humanity in order to bring about his purposes.

The second problem, and the one which is perhaps most important for those who do not have a compelling consciousness of omnipresence, is that of theodicy, i.e. why bad things happen to good people. Put very simply, if you propose:-
1. God is all-powerful
2. God is all-knowing and
3. God is omnibenevolent (i.e. wishes the best for each and every one of us)
the mere observation of the world tells us that bad things are happening daily, hourly, minute by minute and second by second to millions of reasonably good people. Thus not all of these statements can be correct; either God is unable to correct these evils, he does not know of them (or does not know of them in advance so as to be able to prevent them) or he is not a good God.

A large number of “work-rounds” have been proposed for this problem. If there is a countervailing force of evil, God is not really all-powerful. If God withdraws (kenosis), God is not in practice all-powerful. If God witholds action in order to permit free will, God is not in practice all-powerful. Those are the common answers.

In fact, a prominent process theologian, Charles Hartshorne, wrote a book called “Omnipotence and other Theological Mistakes”, which argues very cogently that neither omnipotence nor omniscience can actually be the case as a matter of philosophy, and, of course, Process Theology holds that God’s power and knowledge are in fact both limited, albeit very great. However, God’s power is expressed cooperatively and relationally rather than unilaterally. Theodicy is not a major problem to a Process Theologian.

The third problem is that God is thought of as perfect and therefore unchangeable and unmoved by emotion (“impassible”). This is not easy to provide proof texts for, and is in fact a deduction drawn from Platonic and Aristotelean philosophy; indeed, the Hebrew Scriptures are full of instances in which God is seen to be wrathful, jealous, merciful, loving and downright emotional. There are also several instances of God changing his mind – the sparing of the Ninevites after their wholesale repentance in the story of Jonah springs to mind. A particularly good account of this is found in Jack Miles’ book “God, A Biography”, which treats the Hebrew Scriptures as a work of literature in which God is the main character (as far as I know an unique approach) and seeks to plot his character development.

The fact that unchangeability and impassibility is not well supported by scripture is only the start of it; if we are to talk about having a relationship with God, or indeed loving God, how is this possible in a situation where no emotion is returned? In fact, the God of the Greek philosophers is distant, unapproachable and indifferent, an attitude summed up by Shakespeare in King Lear: “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods: they kill us for their sport”. It is unsurprising that development of this train of thinking led to the Enlightenment Deists, who were content with a God who set things in motion but was uninvolved thereafter, and was certainly nothing that one could love or have a relationship with, or, really, worship.

Process sees god not as the “unmoved mover”, as classical philosophy would have it, but as the “most moved mover”, intimately involved in every aspect of creation.

I’ll continue in the next post with some further problems.

 

I’ve been avoiding looking more closely at process theology for years, despite knowing that it dovetails well with panentheism – and I determined that I was a panentheist very early in my spiritual life – and also with modern science.

In my last post I mentioned that I’d been kicked into thinking of it again by a scad of blog posts around December and January, but I also was involved with editing a new short book “Process Theology” by Bruce Epperley last year, which I recommend, and which had already started me thinking in that direction. If there’s a major snag to that book, it’s that it’s too short – it’s part of Energion Publications’ “Topical Line Drives” series, which are designed to be very concise. Its shortness and directness is also its greatest advantage, mind you! Bruce Epperley is one of the three or four most prominent process theologians around, so despite its brevity, this is a serious book.

Why was I avoiding it? Well, I am not a philosopher by inclination or training (or, probably, natural ability – philosophy seems to require a certain mindset with which I tend to become impatient). My major interest is in articulating ways of talking about a mystical consciousness of God, and as anyone who has read (for instance) Meister Eckhart will appreciate, while the result may look fairly philosophical, it mainly shows up the inadequacy of human language and concepts to express an experience of something as awesome as God and his relationship with us (and the cosmos).

(Some of my friends use “awesome” a lot in talking of God. No, I have not “gone over to the other side”; I just think that “mind-boggling” and “ineffable” are aspects which need stressing here!)

My first contacts with Process were however through Whitehead’s writings and formulations, and this launches you straight into fairly heavyweight philosophy. I’ve also found Charles Hartshorne and John Cobb less than easy going when they start talking about process, though I like Hartshorne’s demolition of the “omni” concepts (and have blogged about this before). It seems to me that a lot of what is actually wrong with classical Theology comes from arriving at philosophical positions which are somewhat supported by scripture and then using those as guide to reinterpreting the rest of scripture. Perhaps naively, I tend to think that scripture should be allowed as much as is possible to speak from its own historic context without imposing systems on it, and it did rather appear to me that Process, in common with much philosophy of religion, was assisting in imposing systems.

Philosophical language is certainly one way of articulating ways of “talking about a mystical consciousness of God”, though. Indeed, as I’ve mentioned the problem of expressing mystical experience in human language, it might have some merit in expanding the vocabulary. The problem, to me, is when the philosophy overtakes the fact that we are talking about human experience of God, which has tended to be the case with the writings of Whitehead et al. I’m hoping in this series of posts to work out how Process may be of use to me in doing this, hopefully without philosophically dense language.

As I am at root a scientist, I take this mystical experience as being my primary data set. Data is data; you can’t say “I don’t like this data, it can’t be right, it doesn’t fit the theory” (provided you’ve eliminated things like deliberate falsification and accounted for any bias in your instrumentation – which I grant is no simple thing as your instrumentation here is individual human consciousnesses). No, if the data doesn’t fit the theory, the theory needs to be altered, as I suggested in my last post is the case with classical theology and will be expanding on later.

Mostly, of course, theories in science are adjusted very slightly; if a theory has worked reasonably well (and in order to last, it must have worked reasonably well) it must have been describing the situation fairly well; it gets changed to accommodate some data which just didn’t fit, and usually this can be achieved by a slight tweak to the theory. Very occasionally there is a revolution in thinking, and an entirely new way of conceiving of something comes along (relativity and quantum theory are two examples from my old scientific sphere), but even then they tend to allow the old theory to be a “special case”, as in the case of relativity; Newtonian mechanics still works well in non-relativistic cases.

Process is, however, a radical rethinking, not a slight adjustment, as I indicated in my last post; a “new operating system”. Bruce Epperley’s book makes a start on providing a way of doing the adjusting, to be sure, but can’t in that few pages really address all the implications of this way of thinking differently about God. In addition, it is probably foolish to talk of “Process Theology” as if it were an uniform thing – it isn’t; Process Theologians share some major basic ideas, but there are many slightly differing Process Theologies, and Dr. Epperley’s is one of those; slightly different from (for example) Whitehead’s rarified philosophical version and different again from John B. Cobb’s worked through thinking.

So what I’m proposing is to take Process thinking and see if it expands my ability to talk about mystical consciousness of God without getting overly philosophically technical or letting the philosophy take over the – er – process.

The most fundamental novel aspect of process theology is that in it, God is capable of changing, and indeed does change. Dr. Epperley comments that philosophically, Process stresses movement, change, relationship, possibility, creativity, freedom, and open-endedness. It follows that Process does not regard God as being unchanging, or impassible (that is to say emotionally unmoved), or in principle separated from humanity. It doesn’t stress the concept of perfection, though perfection could be incorporated as long as it isn’t regarded as something static; certainly it doesn’t start by positing the perfection of God and then deducing multiple other things from that.

It also doesn’t regard God as being either omnipotent or omniscient in anything remotely like the classical sense. Charles Hartshorne, a process theologian, has to my mind exposed the impossibility of both of these characterstics in “Omnipotence and other Theological Mistakes”. They both, of course, tend to spring from consideration of God as unchangeably perfect.

Process is also fundamentally unitive rather than divisive. It sees connection and interdependence rather than separation and independence, it sees the unity of all things in God rather than a vast gulf placed between the Creator and the created, and finally it doesn’t rest on a duality of spirit and matter or of ideals and the concrete.

In my next post, I will look at some of the ways in which I think classical Theology has failed us, to underline why it is worth looking at Process as a way forward.

 

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Jai McConnell left “The Voice” this year in the knockout rounds. A shame, I felt, as she has an instantly recognisable, unique voice; just the kind of thing “The Voice” looks for, in my eyes. But I mention her here because of her chest – and I have in mind her startling ink, not (for instance) her lung capacity. Just in case you thought I meant something else…

In case you can’t get that from the link, it reads “Nothing endures but change”.

There was a time when this would have been a much more controversial statement than it is today. Science, in particular, has come to terms with the fact that what we used to perceive as solid and unchanging is, in fact, changing – mountains are ground down over years, continents move, stars are born, grow and die, even the universe itself appears to have a defined beginning and the prospect of a long-away heat death. Solid matter is not only not solid, being mostly empty space, but even the particles of which it is composed are at their most fundamental level something more like vibrations, and even their positions are ultimately uncertain thanks to Werner Heisenberg.

We have had to move beyond the philosophical basis we once had, which was for most of the history of Western Civilisation fundamentally Platonic. The observable world was, to Platonism, a corrupted and degraded echo of an intangible world of ideals; the ideal was fixed and unchanging and perfect, and the more untouched by outside influences something was, the nearer perfection it was viewed as being – hence (in part) the value placed on gold, which was for a long time the most unreactive metal known.

Platonism went hand in hand with atomism, the idea that everything could eventually be broken down into indivisible (a-tomos from “no cutting”) particles which were then combined like building blocks, and which were in a way “perfect”, as they didn’t change. But the atom was split, and the result is a host of subatomic particles which at some level appear and disappear and are defined by probability densities rather than locations and sizes, and even those are as much waves as particles.

Of course, all these concepts actually allow us to describe how things work far better than did the old concepts; technologies derived from this thinking allow, for instance, the writing of this blog and its transmission to its readers, as well as countless other applications throughout the lives of most people in the developed world. The 21st century Physicist largely regards the Platonic philosophical basis as useless, pointless, a distraction from how things actually are.

Not so, however, much 21st century Theology, including those parts of theology labelled “conservative”, “orthodox” or “evangelical”, not to mention “fundamentalist”.  This is hardly surprising; the New Testament is, in one way of looking at it, the point where Jewish monotheism got translated into Greek language and, in the process, into Greek philosophical concepts, notably Platonism. A new set of philosophical concepts gave rise to a new way of conceiving of God and of God’s relationship with mankind. I will grant that that is not by any means all that happened in the process, but it is most definitely one of the things which happened.

Towards the end of last year and stretching into the early part of this year, a lot of blog posts were talking about concepts such as process theology and open theism. Partly these seem to stem from a piece by Roger Olson (some are linked to at Homebrewed Christianity), but some posts seem to have been independent of the line of discussion which was set off by that post, such as this one from James McGrath. This led me to start thinking about the general area of God-concepts, and I’ll write a bit more about my historical position there later.

It has, I think, to be said that ditching a God-concept in favour of a new one is a really major upheaval. Tony Jones I think touches on this, saying “This is: By almost every measure, process theology is a radical rejection of what the church has believed for 1600 years, so what voice do you think the historic church and classical theism [has] in our present situation?” This is a very fair point. One commentator (who I cannot now find a link to) said, in effect, that adopting process theology was rather like installing a completely new operating system on your computer; you don’t do that unless you have to, as there’s a significant possibility that all of your programmes will need to change or at least be updated.

I’m going to suggest that we have to, and, in fact, that we should have done this years ago. Part of the reason is that given above; science has moved beyond Platonic thinking and the philosophical structure which we now think best reflects the way things actually are is very non-Platonic indeed; to try to impose Platonic ideas on modern science would be to warp and distort it so that it was of much less utility in describing things and predicting events (though those two may best be thought of as the same – it may be that we should think only of events and not of things at all). Assuming for a moment that theology actually relates to how things actually are, should we not bring theology into line with science here?

There are other more detailled reasons, however, which I’ll go on to in the next post.

There still seems to be a reluctance among Christians to consider the gospels as being myth. There was a certain amount of scandal following the publication of John Dominic Crossan’s “The Power of Parable: How Fiction by Jesus became Fiction about Jesus” a little while ago. The thesis of the book (which is fascinating, and which I strongly recommend without necessarily endorsing its contents) is that Jesus told parables, and then the gospel writers told what are in effect extended parables about Jesus through the medium of apparent biographies.

I don’t see that this should be a problem, myself. Myth is story, and conveys a message independently of whether it is factually correct or not (just as do parables or jokes). I’m reminded of the meta-joke “A Rabbi, a Priest and a Pastor walk into a bar; the barman says ‘This is a joke, isn’t it?’ “ which I think was coined by Neil Gaiman. It is funny whether or not it ever happened; the parables convey important and true messages even if the actual events didn’t happen. So why do we ask more of the gospels?

Well, because they look like biography, obviously. They may very well be biography – I tend to the position of historical-critical scholarship myself, which tends to the conclusion that there is a core of factual material but that it is submerged in a mass of non-historical additions, but would be quite happy if, perchance, all of the material which is not actually mutually contradictory between the four accounts were factually correct. However, in talking with other Christians, if we can get beyond that point, almost all of the lessons learned from reading these accounts are “spiritual”, by which I mean not evident in material form.

They are equally capable of carrying that spiritual meaning whether they are “true” or “false” – and so I prefer to use the term “myth”.

“Myth” does not mean “falsehood”, despite everything you may hear from the “new atheists” such as Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris. It means something which is independent of, which is above truth and falsehood. There can be no untrue myths, merely myths to which we relate well and myths to which we do not relate well. It is a story we tell about the world which carries a message…

Terry Pratchett is a master story-teller, chiefly in the field of fantasy. His “Diskworld” books have sold many millions, and appear on best seller lists immediately they are published – and some of them are about science and philosophy (the “Science of Diskworld” series). Actually, rather more of them are actually about science and philosophy than that; those themes run through almost all the books which involve any of the wizards of Unseen University, but it is made explicit in the “Science of…” set. They also tell some very true stories about such things as economics, media, politics, sociology and literary criticism… but I digress.

Personally, I think Pratchett is undervalued as a post-modern philosopher. Yes, honestly.

One of the things which he suggests (and which I take on board unreservedly) is that science consists of a “set of stories we tell about the world which carry a message” as well. They are not however quite the same thing as myth.

Austin Roberts wrote a post a few years ago, “What is Truth”, which engaged some postmodern thinking about the limits of what we can legitimately say is “truth”. In it he has a set of criteria (about 2/3 of the way through the article). Science uses noncontradiction and adequacy to the facts a lot, and in particular (as the stories science tells are supposed to relate to events in the external world rather than in what I might describe as “concept-space”) it predicts what will happen in circumstances we maybe haven’t seen so far. If the prediction is then seen in those circumstances, the adequacy to the facts of the “story” is improved, if it isn’t then the adequacy to the facts of the story is damaged, sometimes to the extent that the story has to be discarded (which can never happen with myth).

We’ve just seen an example of looking at circumstances not previously seen in the results of a set of scientists in Antarctica working with very sophisticated telescopes. The result (assuming that it’s confirmed by other scientists) is that one “story” about how the universe behaved just after the Big Bang will be scrapped, and several variants on another will be scrapped as well. We will have more confidence in the remaining story (which will still have a few variations possible, and no doubt will acquire more variations). What we are never going to be able to say is that this has one-to-one correspondence with the “external world”, which we regard as “reality”.

So why are these scientific stories different from the stories we tell as myths? That’s because the myths deal with human behaviour and feelings and what happens in our own concept-spaces, our internal worlds. If we relate to a myth, it becomes part of our concept-space quite irrespective of whether it actually relates to something evident in material form. Human behaviour and feelings are massively influenced by what happens in our own concept spaces, and myths therefore have huge power – and they don’t have to be “true” (and they don’t have to be “false” either) in order to do that.

Some of my readers are going to be feeling somewhat upset at this point. They’re likely to say that I’m attacking theology and its attendant doctrines as being nothing more than fiction. That isn’t the case at all – what I’m saying is that the practical importance of scripture is as story, as something which, if we relate to it and incorporate it into our concept spaces, has a transformative effect on us; the practical importance is not that it tells us the truth about the world, and particularly not that it tells us the truth about the material world.

In much the same way, the practical importance of scientific stories is that they enable us to predict what will happen in the material world better, and to find ways of manipulating it to our advantage, it isn’t that they tell us the truth about the world, and particularly not that they tell us the truth about the spiritual world.

This is fairly close to producing the result proposed by Stephen Jay Gould, of “non-overlapping magisteria”. Not quite, however. Richard Dawkins has criticised the concept on the basis (broadly put) that religion couldn’t keep itself out of science, as it claimed complete control by its own nature; I’d put it differently, that anything which deals with the way you organise your concept space inevitably has the likelihood of affecting that part of our concept space which deals with the external world (only the likelihood, as many people are able to erect internal divisions between different ways of looking at things, particularly if they incorporate the concept of non-overlapping magisteria into their concept space).

It has also been criticised on the basis that science excludes the supernatural, and inasmuch as the supernatural affects the material world, so science is going to exclude religion. This is fair to some extent, although I would point out that religion traditionally regards supernatural effects in the material world as miracles, and miracles as being by their nature rare; the overlap shouldn’t therefore be very large, and therefore the conflict also shouldn’t be very large.

I arrived at this way of thinking to a considerable extent due to discussing the Bible (on The Religion Forum) over the last 15 years or so with Christians who were substantially more conservative than me. I will grant you it isn’t difficult to find Christians who are more conservative than me, although I actually score higher for postmodern or emergent Christianity than I do for liberal Christianity in a recent questionnaire. I found consistently that if we were able to get beyond matters such as whether scripture was inerrant and non-contradictory between passages or not, and whether scripture was historical or not, we could focus on the “spiritual meaning” of passages and have constructive discussions in which we didn’t disagree to a radical extent and often could find a meeting of minds.

There is a significant other consequence of this viewpoint for me, and that’s the way in which I see interfaith dialogues. I’ve read with interest books such as Brian McLaren’s “Why did Jesus, Moses, Mohammed and the Buddha Cross the Road: Christian Identity in a Multifaith World”, and note with pleasure moves towards positions which allow interfaith dialogue without issues of “my faith is better than your faith”, but have tended to find that they all (as McLaren does) try to preserve a sense of why actually Christianity IS better than [insert the name of a faith of choice]. I don’t think I need to do that in the slightest. Christianity is best for me, as I have assimilated a great deal of specifically Christian thinking into my concept space, and far more (and on a deeper level) than I have of any other faith system. It’s perfectly possible for a panentheist mystic to operate within a Christian paradigm, as many examples of Christian mystics have had at least a broadly similar set of “stories” in the relevant bit of their concept spaces, and it’s increasingly respectable to do so, as (for instance) Marcus Borg has testified to panentheist mystic thinking recently.

I very much like the metaphor of multiple roads leading to the top of the mountain (many paths, one summit), but this has taken something of a knock recently, for instance in Stephen Prothero’s “God is not One”, which sets out from the point of view of comparative religion to demonstrate that eight major world religions are irreducibly unique. I’ll ignore his suggestion that techniques differ between religions, as although this is correct, I know so many people who combine techniques from two or more religions that I can consider this non-foundational.

Austin Roberts, commenting on Prothero, writes “As Prothero points out, the religions do not share a finish line but they do share a starting point: “Where they begin is with this simple observation: something is wrong with the world.” But after this point of contact, the religions diverge sharply when they attempt to diagnose the problem and prescribe a solution. For Christians, sin is the problem while salvation from sin is the solution. For Buddhists, suffering is the problem while liberation from suffering (nirvana) is the goal. For Muslims, self-sufficiency is the problem and the solution is submission and paradise”.

Actually, I think the way of looking at religions as incorporating a set of stories into your concept space allows us to recognise and respect what Prothero is expressing while still maintaining the unity of the finish line (God). Of course, mixing elements of one story with another produces a confused and contradictory result (I could argue that that already happens within Christianity between different scriptures, as I don’t think Christianity can be boiled down to sin and salvation). I include within “story” concepts such as sin, salvation, suffering, nirvana, self-sufficiency and paradise, each of which is in its own way a story, and note that each religion actually has a family of stories which work more or less well with each other and, by and large, less well with stories out of other religions.

However, to me they are stories told about the same underlying relationship. Rather than the metaphor of different roads up a mountain, I prefer the story of the blind men investigating an elephant. One feels a tusk, and says “It’s like a spear”, one feels a leg, and says “It’s like a tree”, one feels the trunk, and says “It’s like a snake”, one feels the tail, and says “It’s like a rope”. All are telling a reasonable story about their experience of the elephant, and none has the complete picture.

One last thing. I talk often about mystical experience, and how this is foundational to me. Where does this fit in the distinction between story about the external world and story about the internal world? The answer is, I don’t know, but I suspect it’s based on a phenomenon in the external world, albeit probably confined to my own skull; there have been events in my neurophysiology which have given rise to my perceptions. If you like, the original peak experience was a “new hardware detected” event rather than a “software upgrades are available for download” event.

I now need to go away and think about whether the need to install a “driver” on connecting new hardware fits into this scheme or not. Any answers?

In a number of previous posts, I’ve used the term “disindividuation”, which seems to have produced some confusion in readers. I always contrast this with “deindividuation”, which is a reasonably well known but contentious social-psychological phenomenon in the psychology of groups, and particularly mobs.

In deindividuation, the identity of the individual becomes subsumed by the identity of a group, and the group is then treated as having its own consciousness. It leads to the dissolving of inhibitions and concern for the self, the only concern being the group.

There is a distinct linkage with disindividuation, for which I cannot find a link to a satisfactory internet article. Disindividuation similarly involves a weakening (sometimes near to the point of disappearance) of the sense of self in relation to the other, but the “other” in this case is commonly a much wider category than a group or mob, and is commonly identified by the one experiencing disindividuation as “God”. It is a common feature of peak mystical experiences, but has also been stimulated by researchers interfering with electrical activity in the brain in experimental circumstances, who have identified brain areas involved.

It is by far the most peculiar aspect of my own peak mystical experiences, which have not uncommonly involved a paradoxical sense that the self has at the same time been extinguished, and that it has expanded to include all that is, and possibly more than that. It can fluctuate, with the sense of self including anything from a small nugget within the body, through the body to the body and its immediate surroundings, the immediate neighbourhood, the world and the cosmos. The most persistent identifications (probably because they are limit situations) are with nothingness and with the All which is not less than the cosmos and which is God.

Meister Eckhart wrote “Thou shalt know him without image, without semblance and without means. – ‘But for me to know God thus, with nothing between, I must be all but he, he all but me.’ – I say, God must be very I, very God, so consummately one that this he and this I are one is, in this is-ness working one work eternally; but so long as this he and this I. to wit God and the soul, are not one single here, one single now, the I cannot work with nor be one with that he.” (Sermon XCIX, from Happold, “Mysticism”). I think this captures some of the sense of the disindividuation which I am talking about.

One consequence is that from the point of my first peak experience, I have been unable to see anyone else as being entirely “other” to me, and indeed I had some early problems with an excess of empathy, in which the feelings of other people (which I was noticing to an extent previously inconceivable) tended to overwhelm me. I didn’t have difficulty “loving my neighbour as myself”, I had difficulty not being slave to every strongly felt wish around me to the occasional serious detriment of my narrower self-interest; my narrow self-interest was at times difficult to identify as my focus, my sense of self was so often wider than that. Another consequence, of course, was an inability to see humanity as in any absolute sense more valuable than, say, the animal kingdom, life generally or the cosmos at large; a concern for ecology is mandated as a small subset of this.

I had to develop some barriers against this lack of individuation overwhelming me in order to function sensibly in the world, in fact. It is all very well “dying to self”, but this opens up a confusion of competing influences unless one has the luxury of being able to settle into a life of more or less solitary contemplation and focus entirely on the All (God) and relationship with that All.

In a blog post about the theology of Paul Tillich, Austin Roberts writes:- “Tillich defines the “Protestant principle” as the rejection of anything finite as appropriate objects of ultimate concern. Furthermore, faith is not merely a cognitive activity because it involves the whole person. Faith is directed toward the unconditional but also grounded in something concrete: “Faith is the state of being ultimately concerned. The content matters infinitely for the life of the believer, but it does not matter for the formal definition of faith.” Faith as ultimate concern about the unconditional is distorted and idolatrous if one is ultimately concerned about something conditioned and finite.
Faith as ultimate concern involves total surrender of the self to either that which is truly ultimate or something less than ultimate (e.g., a nation, career, money, etc.) and the expectation of fulfillment through it.”

In terms of Tillich’s theology, therefore, the experience, repeated several times in greater or lesser extent (and the attendant disindividuation), produced a shift in the “focus of ultimate concern” for me. Nothing less could really be that ultimate focus for me, though the focus itself is paradoxical, being (in a way) at the same time nothingness and the All – and everything in between. I don’t know whether I would characterise focus on something less than the All as being “idolatrous”, but it is certainly an inappropriate direction for any ultimate concern. The mystical experience has in my experience a self-verifying character; it demands that alteration in focus in verifying that the perception is true.

I also don’t know that I would label it “not merely a cognitive activity”; while yes, it involves the consciousness of the whole person as a part of the All and not by any means a predominant part of the All, this is still a conscious (and unconscious) orientation, a feature of neuropsychology and as such inescapably cognitive. However this ultimate concern either amounts to, engenders, or includes as a constitutive part love and trust. As love and trust are overwhelmingly emotional issues, it is dominantly affective rather than cognitive, and so perhaps deserves to be regarded as more than merely cognitive, at least in the narrowest sense of “cognitive”.

Another aspect lies in the words “rejects anything finite”. The concept of an infinite and transcendent God leads, philosophically, to the problem of “ontological separation”; God is so different and so separated from man that there is no way of crossing the divide short of divine intervention, leading (for instance) Karl Barth to talk of humans as being “utterly incapable of discovering the infinite God in whom they place their faith as Christians”. The experience of disindividuation is one of radical immanence; the All, that which is God, is not and cannot be separated from the self; there can be no problem of ontological separation as all that is is part of the substance of that which is God.

[I don’t myself think that the problem of ontological separation is a real problem; to me it is analagous to Zeno’s tortoise paradox, resting on a misconception about infinities, and therefore a feature of philosophy and mathematics rather than of reality.]

That said, my own experience was that I needed an intervention of dramatic proportions in order to move from where I was to something like where I am now. I grant that it took me many years of practice to recapitulate that experience sufficiently that it became (in a much watered down form) fairly readily accessible via an effort of my own, but the initial experience was unmerited, un-worked for and might have led me to believe that an ontological separation had been crossed from the other side were it not for the contents of the experience. If at any point I should seem to be boasting about lack of self-centredness or wider concern, the reader should understand that this was at least initially given, and due to no merit or work of my own.

It is, I think, worth pointing out two other facets of the mystical experience which may or may not be linked in some way to disindividuation. One is that the experience is self-verifying; it comes with an inbuilt conviction that it is true perception, that this is the way things actually are. This is pertinent to my linking of it to faith above; it is massively convicting, and while I have aimed all my resources of scepticism and rationality at it and still from time to time entertain the idea that it results from a peculiarity of brain chemistry and is not provably more than that, at the end of the day I cannot do other than have faith. It is not, to me, an issue of “belief”; I believe or disbelieve things on the basis of evidence and probabilities, it is a matter of hard self-verifying evidence, of fact.

Secondly, the experience as I’ve known it is of timelessness. It is not merely physical boundaries which become meaningless, but also temporal ones. Aldous Huxley wrote of the “timeless moment”; I think of it as entering, however briefly, into atemporality. Past and future are both in some way “now”, and “now” is all that there is. God is frequently conceived of as eternal, which is normally thought of as having no temporal beginning or end, existing for an infinite amount of time. I have reservations about infinities being real at the best of times, but the concept of God as being not, as some put it “outside of time” but independent of although involved with time resonates well with me.

Sadly, unless I am in the course of having a peak mystical experience, thinking about time too deeply is inclined to scramble my brain. I recall the quote ” I know what time is, but when I think about it, I don’t” (which my memory tells me was Augustine); that pretty much sums it up.

This probably has a lot to do with my impatience with boundaries, in which I include doctrinal statements. That which is God may not, for me, be infinite in several ways in which conventional theology wishes (such as power and knowledge) but is unbounded in most (if perhaps not all) aspects – and in particular is not bounded by a gulf of separation between God and man. That just doesn’t make sense to me.

 

 

I’ve just read a rather good article (the first of a series) on accommodating science and religion. I look forward to more articles. This serious treatment resonates with me, as those who know me or my writing will know that I am a scientific rationalist for most purposes, but with a mystical streak.

In conscience, accomodating science and religion does not seem such of a problem in the UK (as opposed to in the States). By and large, here I find that those who are religious (or spiritual) consider that science and religion deal with different material and talk of different ways of understanding, and consider that these are complementary. I think that way to a great extent myself; the material world is evidence, and the evidence of the material world is wonderfully explained by scientific method. Not at the moment perfectly explained, but better explained than was the case (say) 50 years ago, and it was better explained 50 years ago than it was 100 years ago, and so on, at least back to 1600 or so.

I have no time for logical positivism, however (“Anything that can be known is known by logical and empirical methods. Anything else is nonsense.” quoting from the article). Nor am I quite a logical empiricist (“knowledge is gained through scientific measures, and any claim to know must either be of that kind or something that could be revised scientifically.” – ibid), though when talking of the material world, I come very close to that position. You couldn’t remotely accuse me of being among the religious who “accommodate” science as a result of lack of faith or the pressure of social norms, were you attacking me from the conservative Christian point of view (as some have found out in the past) though you could if attacking me from the other direction more justifiably accuse my God-concept as being a “God of the gaps”, i.e. the operation of God in my understanding has to fit within those areas not currently explained by science. Of course, the implication of a “God of the gaps” is that science proceeds to close gaps at a remarkable rate, and my atheist friends point to the trend and tell me that soon there will be no gaps for my God to fit into.

I can’t see that as a possibility, though, and that is because my faith is also based on evidence, albeit evidence which is (as far as I can tell) entirely internal to me and therefore of no value for convincing anyone else. I have had experiences which, to me, were experiences of God. Those experiences are to me hard fact. I’ll come back to them shortly. Firstly, one or two thoughts about what science can actually tell us.

The article quotes Isaac Asimov saying “… when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.” (Asimov, 1989).

I actually take issue with Asimov saying “they were wrong”. This is why:

If I am going to draw a map of my home town, I will do it on a flat piece of paper. For the purposes of drawing a map of the town, it is flat (and those of you who know my home town will particularly agree – it’s in an area where a rise from 5 feet above sea level to 10 feet above sea level is called a “hill”). That, however, breaks down very slightly if I’m going to draw a map of my country, though as my country is quite small by world standards, even then there isn’t much distortion. If I were drawing a map of the United States, however, I would have to take the curvature of the earth into account.

And for almost all map-drawing purposes, considering the earth as a sphere is perfectly adequate (there is some flattening around the poles, but those areas are of so little use to us that the distortions aren’t of much significance).

What I’d prefer to say is that when people thought the earth was flat, they were right within the scale they were thinking of, and when they thought it was spherical the same thing applied. The demonstration of this is that we still use flat maps, we still use spherical globes. They are useful as long as you don’t try to use them in conditions in which their accuracy breaks down.

The article does point this out:- “Now explanations are better or worse if they are more or less accurate in their predictions than alternatives. So Newton was better than Aristotle, and Einstein is better than Newton. Some day we may have an even better theory than Einstein’s, but we cannot deny that we do more now using Einstein than we did with either Newton or Aristotle”.

There’s another progression of the same type here, but with an important difference. We do still use Newton’s equations of motion in smallish scale calculations; using Einstein’s equations complicates things, just as trying to use a globe to navigate around your hometown complicates things, but by and large we don’t use the Aristotle-Ptolemy system for computing the movement of celestial bodies. Why? Because it’s more complicated than using Newton’s equations. (Aristotle and Ptolemy only had the concept of circular motion in the heavens, and didn’t have the concept of a square law force acting on objects rather than a fixed length link; the result was a plethora of circles around points on other circles; the result pretty much did the job it was intended to for early astronomers, but brought in huge numbers of additional circular motions. The equations are simpler for a circle than for an ellipse, but the sheer number of circles needed renders Ptolemaic spheres less useful than Newtonian ellipses – and they can’t explain parabolic motion such as comets at all). In fact, Ptolemaic astronomy was slightly inaccurate as well – it produced an error of about ten days in somewhat over a millennium of observations – but it was close enough for most purposes.

Explanations are therefore better or worse also if they are more or less simple in their execution and if they require less or more unseen entities (in the case of Ptolemy, assumed crystal spheres) to explain them (the rule against multipying unseen entities is commonly called “Occam’s Razor” after William of Occam).

I’ve got to that point in conversation with conservative Christian friends in the past, and they’ve then said “Well, doesn’t the suggestion that “God did it” involve less unseen entities than most of the scientific theories you can quote and mean that it is more simple in its execution?”. Well, yes – but it has relatively little explanatory power and no predictive power at all unless you are able to define that-which-is-God to such an extent that he will be completely consistent in his actions, and I’d tentatively suggest that this will result in a God who is indistinguishable from a scientific theory. I have friends who explain evolution in this way: “Evolution is how God did it”. Those who consider God as “being itself” (Rowan Williams has been known to say something along those lines) or as “the ground of all being” (popular in Catholic circles, and associated with Pierre Teilhard de Chardin) are going down this or a very similar route it seems to me.

So we need predictive and/or explanatory power, no conflict with evidence, simplicity and as few unseen entities as possible.

The “being itself” or “ground of all being” theologies (or philosophies) have some major advantages. It is probably impossible for them to conflict with the evidence of the material world, as they do not really speak of the material world – that is left to science (some very well known scientists have favoured a similar view). They are philosophically rather satisfying, and they include a transcendent aspect which is markedly lacking in scientific materialism per se. However, they lack predictive power as they stand. They do not really tell us anything about how the universe works.

They also, from my perspective, fail to explain all of the evidence, as they do not give any real insight into the mystical experience, the direct unmediated experience of God, which I take as a piece of evidence, as I mentioned above. They do have a transcendent aspect, which is singularly lacking in scientific materialism, and which is well harmonised with immanence of a sort, but it is a vastly impersonal immanence. The mystical experience is in my experience a vastly personal one, and I don’t find this reflected in “ground of all being” or “being itself” theologies, nor in the extremes of the God-of-absence of, for instance, Peter Rollins.

I need something which at least explains the mystical experience as I have experienced it, which accounts for the evidence (albeit entirely personal) I have. Scientific materialism by itself fails to do this. As I’ve written before, my first impulse when hit with an extremely powerful first mystical experience (which I hadn’t been looking for) was to enquire whether there was something wrong with my mental processes. However, I hadn’t taken drugs or fasted, wasn’t sleep-deprived or oxygen deprived and my doctor at the time assured me there was no evidence of (for instance) schizophrenia or temporal lobe epilepsy. My late friend George Ashley (a psychologist and atheist) went through all the evidence I could put forward and could come up with nothing better than “it was a brain-fart”. He forgave me for thinking that that wasn’t an adequate explanation for me, though it might have been for him – and one reason for my thinking that it wasn’t was the fact that I found I could encourage (if not guarantee) further similar experience by a set of mental exercises. (These became fined down to contemplative prayer and meditation, which I found most effective).

He was, however, correct in saying that it was ultimately all due to neurons in my brain firing in particular ways. Of course it was – everything without exception which I experience can be reduced to neurons in my brain firing in particular ways, and some fairly recent research has given insight into disindividuation and deindividuation, the first of which is definitely a feature of mystical experience, and pinpointed what actual brain activities are associated with this kind of perception. It can even be artificially stimulated, it seems (though this is hardly news to me, as I knew beforehand that certain drugs, fasting, sleep deprivation and oxygen deprivation could contribute massively to the probability of this kind of experience).

[Incidentally, I have no link for disindividuation, but use this to indicate a separation of the sense of self from the individual perspective; where deindividuation transfers that to the group, disindividuation expands it to the universe (plus?) and/or removes or suppresses it completely.]

But then, other brain functions can be artificially stimulated and produce sensation or cognitive results of a more everyday kind. To George, this meant that the experience could just be written off as having no material correspondence, and therefore being a species of delusion. To me, this is just not an adequate explanation. Hovering on the edge of it has enabled me (for instance) to pass exams, produce some pretty fair artwork (many of my posts have one of my paintings at the top), have useful insights into problems, on a couple of occasions superperform at music and the like; the fuller experience is massively invigorating and calming – and includes a substantial self-verification, or in other words the feeling that this is true. If the edge of it produces insights and performance which are demonstrably right, and produces a lesser degree of self-verification, I  cannot reasonably ignore the self-verification of the whole experience.

And the cognitive aspect of that experience tells me that God is radically omnipresent and yet is in something like a personal relationship with me (and always was, whether I realised that or not). Fully transcendent and fully immanent at the same time. No theology or philosophy which does not accommodate this experience as being in some way real can be satisfactory to me.

My problem is that nothing I have experienced indicates conclusively that any direct effect of God on the material world in detail ever happens. It indicates that direct effects in individual consciousnesses happen, and any material effects are secondary, but not direct effects. Certainly I have lots of testimony I’ve heard as to bizarre coincidences, and I’ve experienced a few myself, but once I’ve applied caveats against cognitive biases, I’m left with nothing conclusive. Except that personal, internal experience, and its occasional effects on my ability to do things (or, very occasionally, to perceive things).

So the elephant in the room here is that as I’m interpreting material phenomena through science, I don’t expect anything “supernatural” to happen. I do expect to be occasionally surprised at the discovery of some new feature of reality which can in principle be explored by the methods of science, and that might just be something which is currently labelled “supernatural”. But it won’t be truly supernatural.

I also don’t expect to come across any “spiritual entities” except within the psychologies of individuals or groups beyond the personal mystical experience of the divine, and the divine is one and not truly multiple; that’s what the experience tells me. Adonai echad, the Lord is one; there isn’t room in my experience for another. That said, I’ve read Walter Wink on the “Powers”, and can see realised “fallen” entities in the power structures of today. But not malevolent supernatural beings floating around and picking on people, or even benevolent ones.

I definitely don’t expect to witness any miracles in the sense of something which contravenes the established laws of nature. I find the whole thing, working as it appears to in accordance with laws of nature (including some which have not yet been discovered) to be miraculous enough, and that’s an everyday miracle, if “everyday” and “miracle” can be combined in one thought. Any miracle which does contravene the laws of nature I cannot completely rule out, but it would be vanishingly unlikely. Or, you might say, “miraculous”.

I do however consider it extremely sound psychology to consider all that occurs as God’s miraculous gift to me and to others, even when it seems extremely hard to work out how that can be the case. There is a well-proven link between gratitude and happiness, and even if it hadn’t been well-proven in psychology, I would have noted it as a result of my depression, during which the ability to feel happy and the ability to feel gratitude both deserted me, and on termination of which both arrived back simultaneously. That isn’t actually why I thank God for the blessings showered on me – that’s a natural outflowing of my love for and trust in a God who I experience, but it would be scientifically unreasonable for me to neglect a proven psychological effect.

I’m hoping that at this point I’ve included enough outside explanation to avoid the responses “But Chris, if you don’t really believe in the supernatural, how can you believe in God?” or “But Chris, this God of yours has no real effect, and so is nothing more than an imaginary friend, surely?”. I’m tempted to answer that I don’t need to “believe” in God, as I experience God as fact. A year ago, nearing the end of a six and a half year severe depression, I had not experienced God at all since the depression had deepened in 2006 and did need to believe, but I believed on the basis of past experience, past data, past fact.

I have to grant, though, that my basically scientific outlook means that a lot of the language of the Bible needs to be reinterpreted in order for me to engage with it, as on a naive reading it does deal with the supernatural, with divine intervention contravening the laws of nature, with gods and angels and powers, principalities, demons and a Devil. Walter Wink (and William Stringfellow and John Howard Yoder) have done that reinterpretation for me in respect of the powers, principalities, demons and Devil, at least for the most part; I am not sure I can currently point at any one writer who has done the same exercise in respect of God, though. The “ground of all being” and “Being itself” authors have, I think, a part of the picture, but not all.

The scientific-rationalist outlook also requires me to be continually sceptical about the absolute accuracy of my understandings, and to continue to test these, refine them and occasionally replace them. This is not necessarily a popular outlook among believers, where “doubt” is often considered a weakness. So this is inevitably a continuing process; what I think about these things in a week may differ.

Keep reading!

 

 

 

 

 

 

I am not a great fan of modern worship songs, as a genre. The vast majority of those I hear and sing in the services I attend most regularly fall short on wording, music or both. The wording tends to be extremely short of theological (or, indeed, other) content, repeated too often, and what theology there is tends to be just substitutionary atonement – and I am no fan of substitutionary atonement as regular readers of this blog may gather. Sometimes the music makes up for this, but more often there is really not much tune, with a range of maybe five notes. Happily, the band at this church is extremely good and so my cringe factor isn’t totally over-stimulated.

Sunday last saw me singing along to a song by Chris Tomlin, with the recurring lines “Our God is greater, our God is stronger, God you are higher than any other”, which had considerable verve (and for once didn’t really play the PSA note much). But it got me thinking “greater, stronger and higher in relation to what or who?” (as well as noting that the song definitively refers to Jesus, starting “water you turned into wine; opened the eyes of the blind” and that the extreme stress on Jesus-as-God makes me think “docetism” immediately…)

Not, I think, anything mundane – that would be a little like singing that the universe is greater than a grain of sand (which only evades utter banality if you can see a universe IN a grain of sand). I think this has to refer to other gods, and that is something of a departure from monotheism.

It isn’t, of course, without very solid biblical foundation. The early Jewish concept of God seems to have been as a tribal deity among other tribal deities, but one who was increasingly regarded as supreme above other gods – the clearest reference would be Psalm 82:1, “God has taken his place in the divine council; in the midst of the gods he holds judgment”  (there is dispute about whether the word “gods” is justified, but as the Hebrew word used is “elohim”, which is one of the standard words for the god of the Hebrew bible, I don’t think other translations are justified). The Hebrew scriptures move from polytheism to monotheism, with at least hints that the god referred to as Elohim or YHVH is initially the chief among gods (including in the commandment “thou shalt have no other gods before me”), and Psalm 82 seems to work from a henotheistic point of view – I link to an article on Hebrew henotheism.

I have in the past tended to go along with the idea mentioned in that article, that religion tends to progress from polytheism through henotheism to monotheism – “theistic evolution”, but as the article points out, this is not inevitably how religions develop.

Now, I cannot myself reconcile my experience of God with anything short of radical monotheism, which has tended to drive me in the direction of thinking that theistic evolution is a progressive movement, and that this is how things really are, and henotheism and polytheism are lesser concepts. But I am now seeing this as a potentially arrogant stance. I am also a deeply convinced religious pluralist, or in other words I do not think it reasonable to privilege my own religion over other religions, or my own god-concept over other god-concepts without some good argument. Granted, this stems largely from my conviction that there is, there can be, only one God, and all religions express their worshippers’ experience of that one God – and if there in fact can be more than one God, then perhaps they are worshiping an entirely different god? By the normal standards of Christianity or the developed later Judaism, this would then be a false god, and other religions would be false religions.

I may have touched on an answer in my “Idolatry and Eisegesis” post. A god-concept is not a god, it is a manner of conceiving of deity, and that post argues against treating any god-concept as the actuality of that-which-is-God (amongst other things). The apophatic theology of the Eastern Orthodox church goes in that direction as well; so does the well known Taoist maxim “the Tao which can be spoken is not the true Tao”. The problem is then one of mistaking the concept for the reality; we can experience the reality, but as soon as we start to try to tie that down to a set of words and concepts, we are effectively building ourselves a graven image.

It is therefore a mistake for me to try to take Psalm 82 and translate it into a properly monotheistic god-concept in order to understand it (or to sing Chris Tomlin’s song and do the same); I need to cultivate the flexibility to work with the god-concept which is conveyed there, even if this grates with my own experience of the divine.

And with that thought, I hope within the next day or two to start on what will probably be a series of posts about panentheism, process theology and open theism, a set of loosely linked alternative god-concepts.

Dan Wilkinson has a post about Biblical Truth today. I like it. However, I need to nitpick one of the statements he quotes from The Scripture project:

“3. Faithful interpretation of Scripture requires an engagement with the entire narrative: the New Testament cannot be rightly understood apart from the Old, nor can the Old be rightly understood apart from the New.”

The first of these is patently true; the NT quotes passages and concepts from the OT so profusely that it cannot remotely stand alone. However, we should remember that the OT arrived in stages; at one time the Torah (the first five books) was all there was, for instance; later there was the Torah plus some of the writings and prophets; by the time of the New Testament there was the whole of the now canonical OT plus apocrypha and even a few works which didn’t even make it into the apocrypha. The NT writers then built on previous NT writers for something over 100 years.

It is disrespectful of Judaism to say that “the Old cannot be rightly understood apart from the New”, quite apart from the fact that at most stages before the first century not all of the Hebrew Scriptures were available, and it is problematic to argue that there was an incomplete and inadequate revelation for those who didn’t have the benefit of (say) Ezekiel, as they lived before he was born. Or, of course, that there was an incomplete and inadequate revelation just prior to the writing of the Revelation.

Better, I think, to consider that at each point, there was a set of scriptures adequate to the times. Additionally, to recognise that the NT, in part, depends on works which are not themselves canonical, such as Sirach and Jubilees.

This does raise problems itself as am interpretational technique, but less, I think, than considering that earlier scripture is incoherent without later scripture.

I’m somewhat behind with feedback from Alpha, hence dealing with something about four weeks late in my last post. This, therefore, represents something of an improvement, coming as it does only from a week ago as of Wednesday (as I type this bit, it’s Thursday 28th, but the post probably won’t be finished today).

That Alpha talk was “How can we resist evil” and this time, rather than focusing on a personalised force of evil, the focus was on theodicy, i.e. how come evil is permitted to exist. This flowed through into the formal discussion and then into a more informal one I had later while clearing up.

How is it, given that God is thought to be omnipotent and omniscient, but also omnibenevolent, that evil exists? The old choice is between power and goodness; if God has the power to stop evil and does not, then he cannot be good, if he is good and evil is not stopped, then he does not have the power. As the talk noted, this is a problem which has been around since the days of Epicurus. A God who is not omnipotent is, arguably, no God, a God who is not omnibenevolent is, arguably, indistinguishable from a demon.

There are a number of solutions to this logical problem which present themselves immediately.

1. God is not, in fact, omnipotent and/or omniscient. This subdivides:-
1a. God is in fact weak, the thesis of John Caputo’s “The Weakness of God”
1b. God is balanced by a power of evil to which all evil can be ascribed; this has the weakness of either failing to solve the problem (“why does God not defeat the power of evil immediately?”) or positing a dualism in which there is no guarantee of the victory of good; Manicheanism followed that path, but Christianity ostensibly doesn’t, except perhaps for gnostic Christianity, which is officially heresy since the third century.

2. God is not, in fact, omnibenevolent. “As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods. They kill us for their sport.” (Shakespeare, King Lear, Gloucester).

3. God is omnipotent, but reward and/or punishment is delayed e.g. until a post-mortem reconciliation at which point God’s benevolence can be proved. God ensures fair results without actually preventing evil outcomes, in other words. This does not fully answer the issue of why evil outcomes are not just prevented without invoking one of the other possibilities.

4. Evil is in some way deserved or, at least, repaid. This should perhaps be conjoined with #3.
4a. All evils are actually deserved or will be redressed as a result of actions which have occurred outside our timeframe; the obvious example is reincarnation and karma (this is similar to 3, except that the balancing is both before and after the event).
4b. Evils are deserved, but not necessarily on the basis of actions by the one who experiences the evil; original sin, for instance, can be used to justify any evil occurring to mankind as long as no concept of proportionality of punishment is involved.

5. A greater good is being served than the evil which is permitted to exist; this subdivides:-
5a. Good and evil are two sides of the same coin; one cannot exist without the other and good (and variety) are sufficiently good to justify the existence of balancing evil. This is by and large foundational in Taoism, in which existence is a greater good than either good or evil.
5b. Evil stems from the wrongful exercise of freewill, which is so great a good that it justifies the existence of the evil results. (In order to explain evil which is not caused by humans, this concept needs the concept of free willed spiritual powers).
5c. Evil is part of a teaching technique, and is not fundamental; “what does not kill you makes you stronger” and is therefore ultimately “good”.
5d. Evil is not a thing in and of itself, it is merely the absence of good.

6. Evil is not a thing in and of itself (other than as dealt with by 5d), so the syllogism fails; this can be subdivided:-
6a. Evil is illusory (commonly coupled with “as is good”). This is, by and large, the Buddhist solution.
6b. Evil and good are both relativistic rather than absolute terms, and it makes no sense to talk of evil or good except in relation to some person or thing. What is good for one is commonly evil for another, and it becomes entirely possible that “everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds” (Voltaire; “Candide”), thus giving this some characteristics of a #5 solution.

7. For completeness: “This question is above my pay grade; I can cope with a quantity of cognitive dissonance, and any answer is beyond my ability to deduce.” The book of Ecclesiastes seems to adopt this stance, and possibly also the book of Job, although other conclusions are sometimes reached about a moral in Job.

Many writers combine two or more of these to make up a rather less obviously spartan rationale.

At the discussion last week, there was significant input from someone who found a solution in karma and rebirth. I gather there are Christians who manage to splice belief in reincarnation into their thinking, although I’m not familiar with anyone who does this successfully. It seems to offer a sufficient solution, though, for those for whom it makes sense.

I linked above to the Wikipedia article on the problem of evil. Suffice it to say that none of the answers there quite satisfy me, although Alvin Plantinga’s attribution of the whole problem to the existence of free will which is taken as a greater good than any evil which might arise from it, coupled with positing a “mighty nonhuman spirit” (of a malevolent nature) to deal with events of “natural evil” such as typhoons (1b plus 5b) maybe goes some way toward a solution, but is of itself unsatisfactory. Why does God not eliminate this spirit, or (if that would prejudice the spirit’s free will) circumscribe the spirit rigidly? What exactly is it about free will which makes it a great enough good to warrant all the evil I observe? Indeed, is free will really possible, or at least possible to the extent which would make it a great good? Also, it must be taken that, as ultimate creator, this is all (including free will and the existence of the nonhuman spirit) God’s doing.

There’s some scriptural support for the view that God creates evil as well as good in any event in Isaiah 45:7: “I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things” (KJV – other translations attempt to avoid the word “evil”, probably for theological reasons, but whatever term is used fails to avoid the general point). The writer of the “God of Evolution” blog has just made the same argument from Romans 8. There’s a long potential list, probably starting with the book of Job.

I was quite taken by a few lines in a comment by Susan Frederick to Richard Beck’s blog (blogging about weakness and warfare):- “At one point in my own spiritual journey, when considering a sermon I’d heard for the millionth time that “Jesus hung on the cross when it should have been me,” I felt the Holy Spirit present a contrasting thought. “No, the right person was on that cross. God hung there in Jesus because all the suffering in the world ultimately was his responsibility as creator.” It was a strange thought. One I’ve never heard articulated by any preacher or theologian anywhere. But it touched my heart in a powerful way.” In fact, the same concept was articulated by Jack Miles in “Christ, a Crisis in the Life of God”, which I strongly recommend along with “God, a Biography” to which it is a companion.

Susan’s comment, in fact, links to a parting reference made by our speaker that Wednesday to Matthew 25:31-46 (a favorite passage of mine because of its implications); where he went with it was with that which was important being what action we took to relive the suffering because “it could be Christ we were helping”.  He saw Christ as suffering in every suffering person. This issue is then not “what is God doing to stop this?” but “what are we doing to stop this”. In a very major sense I agree with our speaker; it is far more important to combat evil than it is to work out why it happens, at least on the proviso that resistance be nonviolent, as otherwise there’s a risk of creating more evil than is combated. However, I get more from this passage; see later.

In his (warmly recommended) series, Beck is seeking a solution in a combination of “Weakness of God” following John Caputo some way down the path he treads and bringing in a Plantinga-like acceptance of spiritual adversaries (working from Greg Boyd’s “God at War”), rightly commenting that in order to sustain any “Spiritual Warfare” concept, you need a weaker God than the omnipotent and omniscient God of classical theology. Although I incline to say that Charles Hartshorne has demonstrated in “Omnipotence and other Theological Mistakes” that both omnipotence and omniscience are philosophically unsustainable if I’m looking for a quick and dirty exit from a theodicy discussion, I don’t actually see that as an adequate answer. Much as I admire Caputo’s linguistic gymnastics in “The Weakness of God”, I’m not able to buy into that theology myself, not merely because of the raft of scripture confirming God as extremely powerful but because of my own experience, which is inconsistent with a weak God. Accepting Hartshorne’s strictures about the impossibility of true omnipotence and omniscience does not mean that God is not mind-blowingly powerful and mind-blowingly knowing, after all.

The trouble is, for those of us of an inquiring and philosophical turn of mind, the philosophical problem will not go away, and could lead to us failing to act. I go in another direction.

Harking back to “Rather different Answers in Genesis”, I see creation as God creating from himself, thus everything that is is of the substance of and is God (albeit in a very partial way). In the process, he gives away some of his power, that resident in that portion of his creation. This is, of course, a panentheist viewpoint (if I held that God had poured out the whole of his self into creation, it would be a pantheist one, but I cannot escape the experience that tells me that there is more). It is not, however, the panentheism of (for instance) Jurgen Moltman which talks of a withdrawing of God to provide the space in which other things can be, though that can produce somewhat similar results.

This is, in essence, a solution of type 5; a greater good is served. That greater good is not, however, just free will, it is individual existence. Even the inanimate is of and is God, and is permitted existence without (in all probability) having any shred of self-will which could be free, so are “lower” forms of life in which free will is an even more dubious concept than it is in humanity. There is thus no real problem with the criticisms of the concept of free will, for instance from the psychological angle.

There are, of course, both elements of many of the type 5 solutions and elements of other solutions wrapped up in that concept. In particular, it is very compatible with type 6 (evil is not a thing in and of itself) solutions and type 1 (God is not all-powerful) solutions; though there is less necessity to posit other spiritual forces in order to make it work, conceptualising the actions of groups or other strictly speaking nonsentient parts of creation as animated by spirits in the way of Walter Wink, William Stringfellow and John Howard Yoder does meld very neatly with it.

Lest this be thought to be too much a type 2 answer, i.e. God is unfeeling, let me point out that in this concept-space although everything is done by God, everything is also done to God. Elie Wiesel wrote “Behind me, I heard the same man asking: “For God’s sake, where is God?” And from within me, I heard a voice answer: “Where He is? This is where–hanging here from this gallows…”. And that is where Matt. 25 takes me. “Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? ³⁹ When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’ The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’ “.

I take very little literally, but that, I take literally. It is not just that the stranger, the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the sick or the prisoner might be Christ in disguise, it is that they are all God, undisguised.

We suffer, any one of us suffers, any part of creation suffers: God suffers.

A few weeks ago I found myself trying to multitask in the kitchen at the Alpha course I’m helping with, loading and unloading a commercial dishwasher while trying to explain to another helper why I really don’t buy into PSA (Penal Substitutionary Atonement) as an atonement theory. Now I’m a man, and multitasking is therefore not something I’m good at, so I wasn’t giving the theology as much attention as I should have, nor was I able to recall the exact wording of Hebrews with my hands full of plates. In fact, I haven’t yet given Hebrews sufficient detailed attention, as I’ve tended to think that it speaks specifically to Jewish Christians, among whom I do not number.

James quoted Hebrews to me, but in a very general way – under the Levitical system of sacrifices “without blood there is no forgiveness”, and I suggested that if that were what the writer was saying, then the writer was wrong in terms of the Levitical system, because not all sin offerings involved animal sacrifice – it was perfectly possible to sacrifice grain (Lev. 2:1-16; 6:14-18; 7:9-10; 10:12-13). There the conversation ended, because for him it was not viable to suggest that any part of scripture was mistaken.
Sorry, James. I do try not to argue outside the hermaneutical assumptions of those I’m talking to, but on this occasion I wasn’t giving you my full attention.In fact, the relevant passage is Hebrews 9:22, which reads “Indeed, under the Law almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins” (NIV). The word “almost” is crucial, particularly as in the Greek it probably governs the whole sentence, including “there is no forgiveness of sins”. A better translation might be “One might almost [say that] under the Law everything is purified by blood and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins” (some translations do render it this way).What the writer of Hebrews is therefore saying here is not that there was no possible alternative to a blood sacrifice in order that sins should be forgiven, but that a blood sacrifice was very clearly a valid way in which sins could be forgiven under the Levitical system.

There were others, though. Fire (Lev. 13:52,55; 16:27; Num. 31:23; Water (Exod. 19:30; Lev. 15:5; 16:26,28; 22:6; Num. 31:24); Incense (Num. 16:46-48); Intercession (Exod. 32:30-32) and Prayer (of confession and contrition) (Ps. 32 and 51). By the time Hebrews was written, confession, contrition and making amends was already becoming the primary model for sins being forgiven.

Indeed, the Temple sacrificial system was not the primary system for Jews in the diaspora. Granted, the fact that it was there, and was observing the high holy days (in particular the feast of the Atonement, to which a lot of reference is made in Hebrews) was comforting both in a vicarious way, by dealing with atonement in respect of unknown sins and as a hope of eventual attendance there. But it wasn’t the centre of their day to day religious practice; that was the home and secondarily the synagogue or hall of learning. Judaism had found an accomodation for working without a Temple during the long Babylonian exile and during the period of return before the Temple was rebuilt, and it wasn’t any more absolutely vital.

What I arrive at is the conclusion (with which I think the author of Hebrews would agree) that there really was no absolute necessity for sins to be forgiven via a blood sacrifice to end all blood sacrifices. This is good, as I would have extreme difficulty in respecting a deity who did demand this as the one and only way of being forgiven. This is one of the many reasons why I do not like PSA as a theory of the principal importance of Christ; it demands that I see God as something I know he is not.

On the other hand, it was probably high time that blood sacrifices were ended as a means of seeking forgiveness for sins (and for other purposes), and seeing Jesus’ death in that way was a viable image for one part of the complex argument of Hebrews. It had been high time when Psalm 40:6 and Hosea 6:6 were written. Or Amos 5:21-24.

Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream. Forget sacrifices, unless they are of yourself in imitation of Christ.